open source marketer and community manager

productivity

Last night I was asked again to join a Slack channel during a community event and I lost it. I lost the patience for this constant push into a walled garden. I can accept that only at work. I don’t want my email to be given away to a company so they can brag about their growth rate… and for what in exchange? More work for me to signup, pay attention to terms of service, unsubscribe, remove notifications…

No! No! and NO! Community managers, don’t use Slack and please note:

It’s tacky to ask volunteers to surrender their email address to a third party who will use to send “occasionally” unrequested “news and announcements”. No, thank you.

It’s wrong to archive your volunteers conversations and credentials in a big fat place where the next criminal will grab them. Because you know it will eventually happen, right? No, thank you.

Slack works so well in work environment because it keeps history, it’s very good on mobile, its notifications can be fine tuned… it’s pervasive, and very effective… at work! But the last thing I want as a volunteer is to spend time to fine tune notifications for each and every group I join.

Also, you can’t expect volunteers to keep up with the history of a channel (hey, hello, hi, wazzup, thank you, great, awesome, gif, gif gif… ), so that Slack feature is not useful. As a community manager, you should know that there is always one that abuses of the @here @channel @all shortcuts to ask moronic “support” questions in the most populated #general channel. There you have your daily “@all it doesn’t work!” even if there is a channel called #support.

Buzz off, and RTFM! I said it!

There are better ways, not intrusive, easy to start and quit when the meeting is done. Etherpads have chat: do the volunteer work, take notes, share links on the chat. If etherpad is too complicated, I’d accept Google Docs.

Do you just need a temporary channel to chat? Just create one on the fly with freenode web chat, mibbit or any other IRC on web. Hit it and quit it: chances are, the archives of your meeting are not going to be read by anybody anyway. Let your community focus on the asynchronous systems: email works well, forums, comments on your website etc.

You should not give away your community members : they’re not yours to give, in the first place!